Travel Tips, Corey and Sami's Travel Adventures!

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The Great Barrier Reef

We have just moved into our longer term place (approx 3 months) in South Brisbane. We now have access to free wireless internet, and therefore I hope to get caught up with our posts! I have updated most of our photos on flickr:

So we left off in Port Douglas for the reef tour/our first scuba dive. We booked with one of the larger companies that runs tours there called Quicksilver. They were awesome. Basically it took about 1 hour to get out to the reef, and then we traveled along to 3 different parts of the reef.

On the hour out to the reef they go over all the safety tips for scuba diving and snorkeling.

Once at the site you basically have an hour and a bit to explore. At the first site Sami and I snorkeled. We both opted to wear the stinger suits. Stinger season wasn’t here yet, but they also helped keep the sun off of us and make everyone look like super heroes.

In my stinger suit!

Sama Rocking the Suit!

At our very first dive site we managed to see a black-tipped reef shark! Although this may sound scarey, it was probably only about 3-4 feet long. The great white sharks don’t come this far up along the coast so the sharks here usually aren’t dangerous.

Pretty blurry photo, but that’s a shark at the top.

We took underwater photos of a lot of things, but the camera really doesn’t even come close to doing the reef justice. Underwater the colors and the number of fish swimming in and out of the reef was amazing. It was spectacular to see.

So after the snorkel came our dive.

All Suited Up!

The dive was so fun!!!! It was definitely one of the highlights of our trip so far. It is very odd at the start getting used to breathing and exhaling all those bubbles, but once you are down 5-10 meters underwater you can really appreciate the animals down there. We didn’t take our camera since it was our first time diving. It was recommended for us to just focus on the breathing and doing everything okay underwater – but to be honest it was fairly easy to get the hang of! (I’m still talking non PADI dive stuff – I’m sure it gets much more complicated when you have to worry about surfacing too fast and actually worrying about your oxygen levels)

Me Diving!

Sami is OK

We did fork out a few bucks for these photos, but we thought it was totally worth it.

On the boat they also had a buffet style lunch which was pretty good.

At the third site we snorkeled again, looking for turtles (unfortunately we did not see any). Sama managed to see another reef shark! I just missed seeing it.

After the third site we headed home for the day.

View from the back of the boat on the way home.

Overall it was a fairly long day – about 7 hours total, but hopefully later on we get to do something like this again!